People took some potassium and lost some weight | Hacker News Reader

People took some potassium and lost some weight

slimemoldtimemold.com

142 pointsctoth151 comments

Any time you have people start tracking their weight, it’s not surprising that they might start paying attention to their diet and lose some weight.

Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful.

> Without a placebo or control group, these numbers aren’t really useful.

They are. In general with drugs, you want evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the benefits outweigh the risks. And double blind studies are the way to go.

But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier. These guys put the result out there. They explain the protocol (increase dose only if absolutely comfortable). Some people might try and succeed. Some might try and fail. But it's very unlikely some people will try and suffer a heart attack, or some other dangerous side effect.

Of course, please don't take medical advice from me, a random person on the internet. If you decide to try this, it would be best to discuss it first with your physician.

It's not about safety, it's about knowing whether this is effective. We need a control group to know if it really makes you lose weight.

The question is not "is this a low risk intervention". It's "is this a placebo, an effect of weight tracking, or an effect of potassium?"

If it is due to tracking your weight and you just tell people to take potassium, they will not lose weight.

The people that saw the most weight loss were those that also claimed the supplements reduced their appetite looks like supporting evidence for the placebo/weight-tracking effect to me (and if there is an actual mechanism linking potassium intake and appetite, it might be one which only affects the subset of people in a study with a high dropout rate that had something particularly wrong with the levels of potassium in their body and regular diet)

The dropout rate is significant too, both in general and in the specific case of this being a self-selecting sample of readers of a blog promoting fringe theories around weight loss(1). One way to get a statistically significant sample for a weight loss treatment being apparently effective is for people to be most likely to drop out of an experiment without submitting any further data the day the scales give them the disappointing news that they've put the pounds they lost back on again.

Potassium is apparently already marketed as a weight loss supplement, so I'm guessing there are other studies of varying but generally better quality floating around though...

(1)its rather tortuous reasoning why America's obesity rise can't be linked to the rise in average calorie consumption has been posted on here before...

> why America's obesity rise can't be linked to the rise in average calorie consumption

I think most (certainly not all) folks agree with the general "people gain weight because they're eating too many calories". I think the interesting question is "Why did people seem to start doing this now?"

Ice cream and butter and so on are not new inventions. We as a species have never hurt for desserts or calorie dense foods. So what change is it in our environment which seems to be causing the increased intake in calories?

And some of the usual suspects that get trotted out: sweetened soft drinks served in huge quantities for basically free, extremely processed foods with surprising calorie density that still leave you hungry, maybe changes in some of the ingrediants we're using, so on.

I suspect, given that lots of intelligent people have worked really hard on this and haven't landed on an obvious single answer, that it's a big combination of things. The more I talk to obese people the more I'm convinced there's some sort of sociological or psychological element as well as a food element.

HFCS and seed oils were not consumed in quantity by humans 40 years ago. These seem to be linked to both inflammation and enlarging waists.

To be honest, 'why, in the century in which most people had cheap, reliable food sources and motorised transport for the first time in history and many stopped doing manual labour did obesity start going up in many countries where people benefited from these changes?' doesn't seem like a question likely to have an especially counterintuitive answer. Ice cream may have existed in various forms for centuries, but the average person didn't eat 20L of the stuff every year before effective and near-universal refrigeration. (The same blog dismissed the standard claims around less healthy refined foods and people not needing as many calories because they lived more sedentary lifestyles anyway...)

I'm sure there are individuals with metabolic issues that aren't related to their diet and it's not impossible that the "contaminants" this blog is obsessed with play some role. But I also think that sunspot activity plays some role in climate, and I wouldn't expect to stunning breakthroughs in sunspot science from a climate-skeptic blog motivated primarily by proving that the major step change over the last century that's consistent with the theory and the data can't possibly have made much of a difference...

What changed between the 1970/80s and now though?

In the case of the US, the data shows an increase of a few hundred calories in mean calorie intake, not necessarily distributed evenly...

But potassium salt is just not that risky. I bet Tylenol or Ibuprofen are riskier.

I doubt it. Potassium chloride is the active ingredient in lethal injections, too much and it will stop your heart.

Too much tylenol will destroy your liver. The dose makes the poison. I've been prescribed potassium chloride tablets before.

Intravenous potassium is significantly more hazardous than orally consumed.

Wikipedia lists the LD50 of oral potassium at 2.6 g/kg. Meaning your standard 70kg dude would have to eat 182 grams (6.4 oz Freedom Units) to hit that limit. Which would be just beyond horrible to attempt to consume that in a sitting.

Too much $anything, and it will stop your $something you need to live.

Having said that, most by mouth potassium supplements are delayed release so you don’t get it all at once (and absorption already slows things down a lot).

Potassium chloride is used in lethal injections to the tune of 75 mg/kg. For a typical adult, that's an injection of 4-6 grams all at once. You could never eat that much in a sitting: it would taste horrible and probably cause immediate vomiting, and still it's not so readily absorbed through the gut anyway. See:

https://research.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SOP-KC...

You could easily eat 4-6 grams (if you wanted to obviously). But absorption us much lower and slower you probably need over hundred grams or so to reach levels that would be lethal

> you probably need over hundred grams or so to reach levels that would be lethal

Apparently if you ingest ~25grams of _table salt_ your life might be at risk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537768/

I'd imagine Potassium might be a bit more toxic in lesser doses.

I lost 50 pounds in 2020 with this one trick: I counted calories and stayed under 2100 per day.

I didn’t even pay attention to what kinds of food I ate. That came automatically as I would look at a treat and think, “130 calories? That’s so expensive.” I naturally learned what foods made me feel full for longer. It was fun.

Diet can be complicated, but I have a feeling that for most of us, it really doesn’t need to be.

“130 calories? That’s so expensive."

That's exactly how I came to lose all the weight I have - I started counting calories which caused me to treat it like a budget. I never deprived myself of what I wanted, but new if I splurged on supper I'd not be able to do as much dessert.

My favourite part of it is that it’s so simple you can barely call it a system. The diet industry/community really disinterests me because there is so much complexity.

Unfortunately the simple thing is hard. To the extent that every system that isn’t counting calories works, it works by manipulating appetite and satiety to induce a spontaneous reduction in consumption. People will jump through all sorts of hoops to not feel deprived.

Imagine trying to reign in spending without a budget by drinking lots of water to avoid buying starbucks and other similar indirect tricks. Without the budget you’d easily overspend. This is how I think of calorie counting as the only proper way and other diets as inefficient indirections.

This method is simple, and works well enough for enough people, but it doesn't for some. I still kind of agree with you, because I have a sneaking suspicion that people mostly cluster into groups of "any diet / intervention works" and "none of them work".

Unfortunately, the body itself is a complex system, and likes to throw curve-balls. Going by some of the things I've read over the years, it's clear the body has defense mechanisms against starvation - such as lowering metabolism and activity levels in lock step with diminished caloric input, or turning you into food-obsessed zombie, hardly capable of a non-food-related thought, until you feed the body enough to cancel red alert. Problem is, for some people, those defense mechanisms seem to kick in before they reach negative energy balance. As simple as calorie counting is, it's not helpful if the body hits the "override" switch before you reach Calories In < Calories Out.

I don't know if there's a solution for this case, but I suspect all the variety of diets is really just people doing a blind search in hopes of finding specific tricks that shut down the defense mechanism in subgroups of individuals.

(In a sense it's like a puzzle game: your goal is to sneak past a security system without raising an alarm. The security system consists of a great variety of sensors of all kinds - but only a random subset of them are in use, configured with random thresholds. Every player gets their own, unique puzzle.)

A lot of eating is habitual, driven by social cues etc. E.g., anyone who is used to eating breakfast but skips it one day will feel like they are "starving", but if they skip it for two weeks they no longer get that hungry feeling in the morning because your body is no longer habitualized to release ghrelin at the same time.

>lowering metabolism

I believe this has been debunked. Your calories out is a function of calories in (e.g., protein takes more energy to metabolize than, say, glucose), but your body doesn't really downregulate it's metabolism the way it's been touted in the past.

>search in hopes of finding specific tricks that shut down IMO, what consistently works is whatever "tricks" you use to reduce calories below what you burn. For some people, it's eliminating meat. For others, it's eating nothing but meat. For others, it's a flexible approach as long as they count calories. But the main commonality seems to be the reduction of calories (and movement away from the standard american diet).

Yeah, I feel like it's "complicated" only if you DGAF about what you eat

The nutrition info is "in your face" for a reason. Use it.

How many calories on that bag of chips? On that big cookie you ate? On that fast food sandwich/burger?

On that soda which is 100% empty calories with a high GI?

The biggest fraud in nutrition has been replacing high-caloric food that actually help with satiety (high protein/"high" fat/high fiber content) with sugary crap

> My favourite part of it is that it’s so simple you can barely call it a system.

Simply ≠ easy.

What to slow/stop/reverse climate change? Simple: "just" reduce carbon output.

Counting calories helped me with adding more greens to my diet. I found out that I could start lunch (which is my main feeding event) with a healthy portion of lettuce salad and then eat more moderate portions of carbohydrates and meat as my main course and still feel satiated.

Yeah, my personal rule was that fruit and veg were free.

That’s also how I manage my weight. After a while you don’t necessarily need to count everything, you get pretty good at just estimating. I know if I have some drinks, I tend to go over budget and I compensate by trying to have a subsequent day under budget, or do some more exercise.

I like it because I don’t feel deprived. If I want something, I just fit it into the calorie budget. You pretty quickly learn that potato chips, soda, beer, and candy consume budget quickly and don’t fill you.

That’s what drives me crazy about calorie counter apps. They demand perfection which is just totally unreasonable in the messy world. I can’t tell you exactly how many cups of fries are on my plate, or what that sauce is made out of. So you have to guess, but they treat that guess as exact. It would be nice to have a fuzzier counter which keeps track of how sure you are and produces error bars.

I’m quite surprised you haven’t been accosted with the “calories in, calories out isn’t real” yet.

Fwiw it is how I and others I know have lost significant amounts of weight. There was a “keto” thread on hn the other day and holy moly was keto/calories in, calories out attacked and rebuked.

Then why not just eat nothing? That way you only have to focus on the calories out portion? Obviously, some people find it much harder at this than others. Some average-sized adult males get overweight with just 1300-1700/calories a day due to slow metabolisms or other genetic factors.

> Some average-sized adult males get overweight with just 1300-1700/calories a day due to slow metabolisms or other genetic factors.

I think this is largely a myth. (The 1700 calorie end is vaguely plausible but not the 1300 calorie end). There was a good article posted here a while ago [1] which talked about this.

Now, it isn't necessarily easy to maintain a certain calorie count, in terms of either knowing how much you're eating or actually sticking to it despite hunger pangs. And some foods can help you feel fuller with less, you can have different balance of muscle vs fat at the same weight, etc. In those senses I agree with people who say calories in calories out isn't the whole story. But in the end, thermodynamics always wins.

Quote from the article:

> Starvation Mode is this wacky idea that if you eat too little an amount of calories for an extended period of time your body stops burning fat; in fact, it starts doing the opposite–you start gaining weight ‘even when consuming 800 calories’. Sound familiar?

> So, how much truth is there to this?

> Well, see, Starvation Mode is an odd one. Because, while it’s not entirely correct, it’s not entirely incorrect either.

> The correct part: When you reduce calories, more specifically as you begin to get leaner, there is, in fact, some slowing of metabolic rate.

> The incorrect part: Due to this low-calorie consumption your body decides fuck you and proceeds to enter this phantom zone of otherworldliness where the laws of thermodynamics cease to exist, resulting in no fat loss, or worse, gaining fat on some absurdly low number of calories.

It goes on for quite some time, and it's worth reading, but I'll quote just one more part.

> This British actress was adamant she had a slow metabolism, turned out she was simply misreporting calorie intake.

> When she recorded her food intake via video journal, her intake, according to her, was 1100 calories. When they checked her actual intake (with doubly labelled water) it came to 3000 calories.

> Even when she was keeping a food diary, she misreported by 43%.

[1] https://physiqonomics.com/eating-too-much/ discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31381410

Ketogenic or low carbohydrate diets greatly reduce the feeling of hunger and allows you to be burning fat directly most of the times. I assume this accounts for its effect on weight loss: even without counting calories directly, you are eating fewer calories.

I've been doing low carb myself and think this makes sense. Less insulin spiking => more manageable hunger. It's not magic, though. If you're trying to lose significant weight, you still have to make peace with hunger. And low carb—particularly strict keto—can lead to accidental micro nutrient deficiencies, so I track nutrition anyway, even after reaching my fitness goal.

Some people have such slow metabolism that they still get overweight when eating nothing.

Which is how the matrix works: you can use these people as power plants!

Some people are born with 12 fingers. 1700 per day is close the basal metabolic rate (laying in bed all day) for a thin adult male. It is less than 3 hot pockets per day, very few people gain weight eating that much.

You say "3 hot pockets" as though this were an example of some obviously small thing. I would probably feel overstuffed if I tried to eat 3 hot pockets a day and nothing else.

I could do it for a few days but I probably couldn't keep it up for long. I'd throw up probably within a week from gradually basically not being able to keep up. I would still be full from the last one when it came time for the next one, and that would get a bit worse each day.

People are in fact different, and most Americans are like fish that aren't aware of water when it comes to their concept of what is a reasonable amount of food. They are swimming in it all day since birth, and these gross amounts seem normal.

I am thin and energetic. I burn my food. But fairly sedentary and lazy, IE, my job isn't chopping wood all day nor do I ever go to a gym. But I just have nervous energy and am very thin. I'm willing to do active things when there is something to do, I typically go up and down stairs with energy etc. I almost always feel grossly overstuffed after about the 2nd meal if I'm staying with other people and eating on their schedule for more than a day. Normally I just eat one not-large meal late at night and nurse one large (say 14oz) coffee most of the day.

So it's not a slow metabolism, at least as far as most cliche signs appear. When I do eat too much, I don't gain weight much. And yet, I just can not gag down a fraction of what everyone around me eats.

Oh and I'm American too. This isn't coming from an Asian or something when I said Americans. Mostly German & French ancestry. Raised in upper middle class, north east, moved around a out equal parts rural and urban. Basically I was raised in the same environment that I'm saying warped most Americans, and the same quality (good and bad ie processed) and quantity of food was available.

People simply vary and you just can't make many assumptions based on one's own experience.

Wait I just realized something ... unless capitalism has done it's usual thing and hotpockets are much smaller now than the last time I had one. In which case disregard. The more I think about it the more I fear this is entirely likely. :)

Maybe a hot pocket isn't the best example (I couldn't eat 3 hot pockets per day either, I would probably feel sick). A hot pocket weights about 8oz, for reference the meat alone in a restaurant burger weighs about 5-8oz typically.

Can you post a link to that study? My first thought is that 1300 cannot be a caloric surplus. 1700 maybe if we are generous with "average-sized" and assume a completely sedentary person. To me that just sounds like people who aren't counting properly.

Because eating nothing is not sustainable for more than a few weeks.

If you have that slow of a metabolism then you should either build more lean mass and get more active, which drives up the metabolism, or eat less. One way to eat less without feeling hungry is to eat bulkier food, more fibre, and lower GI foods. Since I started eating pure rye bread I'm much less hungry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast

It worked for him

Thermodynamics is thermodynamics. However what I think people are meaning to argue is that “just don’t eat as much” can be akin to saying, “just stop being depressed.” It can basically be impossible if not dangerous for some.

Also, our calorie furnaces all work a bit differently. Thermodynamics laws hold, but some of us have far wider margins for how generously our body will burn off or otherwise not hold on to those calories.

exactly, I don't get why so many people who are presumed to be smart always default to this oversimplistic assumption, ignoring that food consumption and calorie burning are as biologically-driven as almost everything else in life.

The reason is that it works well enough, most of the time, for most people. If you are trying to lose weight, you do not need an exact formula to compute the derivative of your weight with respect to time; you need a mental model of your diet and metabolism that moves you toward your goal. CICO basically tells you to look at your two most important levers for doing that (how much you eat and how much you move) and adjust them until your weight moves in the right direction.

But people have an extremely poor mental model of calories out.

In particular there is a great misunderstanding with respect to the role of exercise. It’s not the calories you burn during the period of exercise, rather it’s the changes to your body that exercise causes that encourage weight loss.

You don't need to have a good model of calories out. Just keep track of calories in and your weight over time, and reduce calories in until you're losing weight at an acceptable rate.

All models are wrong, some models are usefull.

The (over)consumption industry is trying to hammer home a message that basically boils down to 'calories model is not perfect, please do not moderate your consumption'. If forced hey are ok with you consuming 'different', but not with consuming 'less'.

The results can be observed every day on every street.

> some of us have far wider margins for how generously our body will burn off or otherwise not hold on to those calories.

That’s always seemed like a nonsensical rebuttal.

Nobody is actually measuring how many calories they burn per day or the actual content of their food down to 4 decimal places, but you can quickly get a baseline based on comparing rates of weight loss and total calories consumed because the difference in died aren’t subtle. If 2100 calories doesn’t work fast enough try 2000...

The missing measurement is how many calories you poop, and what relationships exist between what and how much you eat to the amount of calories you poop

You just track calories in, and weight. If you stop losing weight, reduce calories in.

It doesn't matter if you "have a slow metabolism" or whatever, because that just means you don't get to eat as much as someone else who weighs the same as you.

There are confounding factors so that you can't predict how much weight will be lost by a given calorie deficit. But that doesn't matter.

You will lose weight if you eat less.

And here’s where the problem comes in for me - when I reach that level, where weight loss begins to be measurable, I am so miserable I can’t think about anything but food 24/7. It’s like being in a staring contest where the other person never, ever blinks.

I'm not a massive proponent of regular fasting but, having done it long enough, I've learned what hungry really means. The experience was invaluable because of that.

I had (and still have to some extent) that same feeling you have but that's not hunger. For me, sometimes it was boredom, sometimes it was routine ("it's 6pm, dinner time!") or just straight up gluttony but that's not real hunger. Want to eat and need to eat are very different.

I'm saying all of this with a bag of cheezits next to me at 12am.

What's your diet like though? I found satiety only roughly correlates to calories in. That is to say, some foods I could eat a ton of calories worth and still feel hungry. Other kinds of food would have me feeling full with far fewer calories.

This, and I get into weird blood sugar deficits where I feel like I'm going to die! It makes it very difficult not to grab some food so you can keep working.

I am not diabetic btw, before hn not a doctor chimes in.

I think it is something to do with high cortisol levels caused by stress. I am currently experimenting with an extreme low carb diet, early results are showing some promise. I am using the better management of blood sugar to eat less early in the day, hoping this will force a lower calorie consumption

Just mixing in salads with some protein I love doing. We grow lettuce- you can dress it and then spend time chatting and crunching lettuce. It passes the time. No idea if it’s actually low calorie but a lot of roughage may help you move stuff out too?

People who feel hungry fail at eating less in the long term.

No diet gets around hunger because the human body tracks how fat it is not just the contents of the digestive system.

Long term weight loss requires you to accept being hungry.

>Long term weight loss requires you to accept being hungry.

It does but there are degrees of hunger. The hunger I feel in the day before I eat is much easier to deal with than the hunger I feel after I have eaten a meal. The hunger I feel when on a low carb diet is easier for me to deal with than if I have had bread/pasta/sweets.

I'm pretty sure that for me blood sugar levels, insulin, and hormones play a big part.There is an optimum diet and amount/type of exercise for me to feel less hungry and similarly there are foods and activities where I am almost certain to feel ravenously hungry despite eating more calories.

> The hunger I feel on a low carb diet is easier for me to deal with

That’s a short term effect. Low carb diets are no more effective long term (3+ years) than calorie restriction.

Most people who lose significant percentage of body weight eventually start dreaming/fantasizing about food etc. It’s possible to push through this and maintain weight loss, but it’s relatively rare.

Short term is what counts when you are trying to avoid snacking. Low carb for some people is what allows them to restrict their calories because they don't feel ravenously hungry.

If you’re fine yo yo dieting where you gain and lose lots of weight then sure use whatever you are comfortable with.

Just don’t be surprised when it takes the same effort over time to avoid gaining weight again. Because it might take slightly longer to kick in, but the same hunger will be back.

Actually you lose most of your mass through carbon dioxide, through breathing. (And similarly, trees and plants get almost all their mass through carbon dioxide, not the soil.)

People also seem to think that "calories out" == "exercise" which it doesn't.

For example, if you ate gasoline encased in glass marbles, you'd be eating a lot of calories. The body wouldn't use much of it, though!

It's not really widely understood how much the caloric content of our food is actually converted to fat.

Calories out means exhaling carbon dioxide (that's the end of the chemical reaction chain of burning fat). So exercise certainly helps.

Yes, exercise helps. But it also can have the side effect on making people hungry. So if the other nutritional inbalances in the people are not kept within limits, the exercise might not be as effective.

Some types of exercise help me to mitigate hunger. Other types make me ravenously hungry and are detrimental to reducing caloric intake. The same goes for different types of food. Finding out what works and what doesn't took a while.

Your metabolism doesn’t use 100% of the energy content of food. It’s actually quite hard to tell the true calories you will get from any give food, it probably depends on many individual factors of both of the human and the food.

IIRC the way calories are measured for food is pretty simplistic, and calories in, calories out isn't terribly accurate.

I can imagine it still helps a lot with weight loss, I myself lost ~20lbs a while back counting calories. But like a lot of diets that take some effort to maintain, seems like they probably aren't easy to keep up long term vs. generally eating more healthy and building habits around exercise.

I think I realized two things a while ago:

1. calories in / calories out is true when calories are around what you need or below. If you go above, a lot it the excess calories will, for many of us, just leave unused.

2. Many people consume a lot morr calories than they think, but because of 1. it can hide itself.

When some of them cut a lot of calories (not count exactly how many they eat in total, but just cut the sugar Cola and the extra chocolate) they might still be above 0 because of the big breakfast, big lunch and too big dinner.

Yeah this is why competitive eaters such as Matt Stonie stay lean while eating 20,000+ calories. His body will waste most of that, and he'll spend the rest of the week exercising and eating healthy.

I didn’t even count calories and lost 30 pounds last year.

Eat less food.

Stopped snacking between meals, and ate a salad for dinner a few nights a week. Also, tried to reduce my meal size, in general.

Getting that hungry feeling between meals that I would always satisfy meant I was creating a deficit.

Exactly.

Find something that works for oneself.

Keto works for some people. Just reducing plate size helps for some.

Personally I skip breakfasts (I love breakfast, but it is not worth the brain fog that I personally get later in the day) and most workdays I just drink 1/2L of whole milk, preferably cold.

I get plenty enough energy from dinner and now I can also enjoy some snack in the evening together with my family.

Do you eat lunch?

No, I usually skip breakfast and the usual lunch.

Typically I just drink 0.5L of milk and walk 2-4 km during the lunch break although I do make exceptions once a week or something.

For me personally this works well, I don't get hungry either as long as I know I am not going to eat.

This worked beautifully for me when I was in my 20s. Now that I’m in the second half of my 40s it doesn’t work well at all. My body requires a starvation diet before I see even a little weight loss, and I can’t keep it up while remaining productive in my job.

This is one of the useful lessons of age: you essentially get to experience living in more than one body within your lifetime. Younger-me would have posted the same confident advice as you did, and it would have seemed just as intuitively obvious - how could it be wrong when I experienced it myself! But in practice for someone with a different metabolism (at any age) it’s deeply unhelpful, even demoralizing.

I’m more than a decade older than you.

that’s what my girlfriend said: “Can’t lose weight after a certain age”

She looked at me one day when I was down around 25 pounds and declared “It does work”

Next thing I know, she lost 15 pounds.

I think people feel hunger very differently.

When I want to lose wait I just stop eating lunch until I start to feel it makes me sluggish. I can tell I should probably eat but that’s an easy to ignore signal.

My ex girlfriend felt hunger as an all consuming normal activity ending feeling.

Women react differently to things like intermittent fasting given the vastly different hormonal profile to men. I’m much like your ex (I can’t think properly until I feel full, which means a significant breakfast) and anecdotally I have noticed that men seem more likely to go for longer fasting periods. Women’s bodies really don’t like to think they’re starving.

As we get into middle age, our hunger sensations grow more out of alignment with our body's caloric needs. I think the focus of most diet strategies is to find ways of minimizing hunger pains while keeping caloric input at or below maintenance level.

Aside from calorie counting, which is very effective, the most important thing I found for avoiding discomfort is to go short on calories earlier rather than later in the day.

I've read surveys on how French women stay thinner on average and it boils down to having just a coffee and cigarette for breakfast and maybe even lunch. Both caffeine and nicotine suppress hunger. I don't recommend smoking, but I rely a lot on coffee sometimes.

I'm fat and well into my 50s and agree. I can fairly easily not eat until lunchtime, it's later in the day when it becomes much harder to manage it all.

And yes, the famous "breakfast of champions" as it used to be known. I don't smoke either but do need several mugs of tea to get me through.

> Both caffeine and nicotine suppress hunger. I don't recommend smoking, but I rely a lot on coffee sometimes.

I drink a lot of black tea and use nicotine gums, and my hunger is... enough to keep my weight way higher than I'd like. So either I'm doing it wrong - perhaps it needs to be actual coffee and cigarettes[0] - or... I should never stop, because my baseline hunger must be off the charts.

----

[0] - Wouldn't be the first time people, including scientists, confuse tobacco (a processed product whose consumption involves smoke and complex chemical reactions releasing a lot of biologically active substances) with nicotine (a single chemical that is one of the many things you ingest when smoking).

Yeah, you must be doing it wrong. :-)

The appetite-suppressant effect of nicotine is enhanced by caffeine (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15955118/)

Conclusion: Caffeine added to nicotine chewing gum appears to amplify its attenuating effects on appetite and the combinations of 1-mg of nicotine with caffeine seem to be well tolerated.

BTW, I've found black tea to be not as effective as black coffee as an appetite suppressant.

Thanks for the tips :).

> BTW, I've found black tea to be not as effective as black coffee as an appetite suppressant.

I wonder what the mechanism of action is for most people. For me, black coffee hardly does anything stimulation-wise, but is an excellent laxative, and half the time makes me feel generally unwell. I suppose these effects do suppress appetite.

This. Our generation was conditioned to abhor any feeling of hunger absolutely. But feeling hungry from time to time is normal.

This is (was?) Weight Watchers. Gamified dieting before that was a word. They used points though rather than calories, which was easier to monetize and meant you didn't run out of fingers.

Yep I was “cutting” (restricting calories in a way to try and lose fat to become more tight and muscular looking) and lose 15 lbs and still had a pizza every week.

> I lost 50 pounds in 2020 with this one trick: I counted calories and stayed under 2100 per day.

Same here. I lost 30 Kg since Jan 2022 when I suffered a heart attack and was installed 2 stents (one more necessary but too risky at the moment). Still need to lose some more weight, although it is becoming more difficult, but counting calories does indeed work. I succeeded only because my soon-to-be wife helped me immensely, or I would have failed miserably if left by myself.

I used an app with a barcode scanner and a huge library of products. It not only tracked calories but gave a nice daily count on fat, protein, carbs and sugar. Simply staying under 2100 calories will drop your weight. No doubt!

However, if you want to be able to maintain that long-term, you need to figure out what to eat so that you get the right balance of carbs, sugars, fats and protein. If you don't then you're either gonna be continually hungry or malnourished (or probably both).

By using the app long-term I developed a set of recipes (that can be modified so I don't get bored) which make up my foundational diet. This is now sustainable without the app, and without cognitive load or will power.

Another improvement step is to stop eating food that comes with a barcode.

At least for me, that would exclude about 40% of vegetables I eat.

That's almost all of the food. The food that doesn't have a barcode when you're buying it was most likely delivered in a barcoded box or bag to the shop itself.

So, no zebra meat? Bummer. >:3

Counting calories has a dramatic effect because it makes you aware of how much eating is habitual rather than because you need the input. People start eating less without consciously trying to. I've read that calorie counting is the most effective strategy for losing weight, but it is also the strategy people are most resistant to trying because of the perceived hassle. It is a pain for the first few weeks as you go about measuring everything, but once you acquire data on your habitual foods it's not a big deal.

> I lost 50 pounds in 2020 with this one trick: I counted calories and stayed under 2100 per day.

Yes, I don't think there's anyone that will dispute this. Weight loss is pretty simple.

However, it's definitely not easy. "Just keep your calories below X" is way easier said than done. It's like saying: "Everyone can run an ultramarathon, just keep putting your foot in front of the other until you're there. It's really simple."

It's not even that simple. The problem is that the body will compensate for the lower calorie intake. The intensity of this effect differs from person to person though. At extreme cases you'll basically have to keep running a marathon on a starvation diet before you can get your body to burn the fat.

As an anecdote, my weight doesn't change much regardless whether I eat 1500 or 3000 calories a day. I'm overweight, but eating 1500 calories is pretty negligible to my weight loss, and I generally have to embark on those more extreme diets to change anything.

>The problem is that the body will compensate for the lower calorie intake.

For the most part, this is a myth, just like the idea that one's metabolism slows as you age.

What can happen is your behavior modifies. E.g., if you eat more, you unconsciously fidget more and burn more calories.

Most people (even dietitians) are not good at gauging their calorie intake. Unless you are weighing all your portions, it's more likely that measuring error is the culprit, not that you can double your calories consistently and not gain weight.

Likewise. I worked out what weight I wanted to be and by when, and put that into a Renaissance Periodisation calorie calculator that told me I need to be below 1600kcal/day.

> It was fun.

Not for me. I tried it for about a month, and it was the opposite of fun. I hated having to keep track of everything I ate. I hated trying to figure out how many calories were in homemade meals. I hated measuring things out to know how many servings I was eating.

That was my first thought too. Even mild psychological crutches to limit snacking would do the trick. “I need to report my weight to someone else” def qualifies

Even with a placebo and control group it still would not be that useful owing to all the confounders.

For me, I simply started tracking what I ate in terms of calorie count, and didn't focus so much on the day to day/week to week weight change. It helped out a lot in generally bringing to light what a "big" day looks like and vice-versa.

I did exactly this about 10 years ago - weighed myself daily, and took fat and measured my circumferences at various points on my body, and wrote it down by hand each day in a table.

That alone was all the encouragement I needed to consider what I ate, drank and did.

Random potassium trivia:

Pot ash manufacturing was an extremely important industry in many countries worldwide from the 1400s-1800s, and potash a highly valuable trade commodity. Mainly for it's use in agriculture as a fertilizer because potassium is an essential plant nutrient.

Potash was originally made from wood ashes by soaking the ashes in liquid and drying it out, leaving an alkali potash residue. Nowadays it is mined deep underground by circulating liquid into the deposits, then evaporated in surface-level industrial ponds.

The first U.S. patent of any kind was issued in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins for an improvement "in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process". The patent was signed by President George Washington.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash

> Pot ash manufacturing was an extremely important industry

Still is if you have a Dwarf Fortress running.

Still is if you live in Saskatchewan

There’s this study from a few years ago: Increment in Dietary Potassium Predicts Weight Loss in the Treatment of the Metabolic Syndrome – https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/6/1256

(EDIT) Some additional articles:

* https://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/S0021-9150(1...

* https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

* https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

After seeing this proposal a month ago, I contacted the authors of the large SSaSS randomized trial [1] (n ~ 21,000) which compared a potassium salt substitute (75% sodium, 25% potassium) to normal salt. There was no reduction in BMI in the potassium group.

Now the amount of potassium consumed was not directly measured, but assumed to be 20g salt substitute per day which equates to 5g KCL or about 2.5g potassium. This was enough to have other biological effects like reducing stroke risk, and was more than most people took in the slimemold study.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2105675

Non-randomized sample and lots of reaching for stat-sig in the analysis. I gave up when they threw out the non-stat-sig result for their success criteria (29 days) and claimed victory bc 28 days was stat sig.

This is incorrect. The article had significant results for 2 groups (everybody and a subset of the participants) on the 29 day result, and also had significant result when looking at 28 days.

They claimed the opposite - since multiple end points and groups all had significant weight loss, it’s not p hacking

If its the potassium, you could test the idea with something else like bananas. I remember hearing years ago that Weight Watchers had reformulated their diet and one of the changes was that you could eat "unlimited" bananas.

My personal anecdote is I eat a lot of bananas (at least one a day almost every day) and a few potatoes and I'm actually having a bit of trouble keeping my weight _high_ enough (150lbs for 5'10" guy). And I have some issues with keeping muscle mass, though partially that's related to no strength training due to an injury for most of this past year, which hopefully I'm now starting to put behind me.

I’m 5,10, 69.5kg, workout actively including cardio and I eat almost no Bananas.

Let’s not all go Bananas over Bananas.

Bananas have low caloric density, which is useful if you're trying to consume fewer calories. Apples are another good low-density snack.

I'm similar. Do you get low blood sugar easily? It seems like people who's bodily readily release insulin (maybe too much) have a hard time gaining weight. Explains why prediabetics gain weight?

I'm not sure if I get low blood sugar. I'm sure if I ate ice cream every day I could gain weight, as I was overweight most of last decade. But now I generally don't eat a lot, little bits throughout the day. I lost my weight with diet and dedicated exercise over a year ago. Then I mostly stopped exercising except for walking, but still kept losing weight. I mostly stabilized around 150, but I have dropped below it a few times (when I do, I sort of binge at my families house). Pretty sure my diet is protein deficient as well (little meat) explaining my muscle issues but then I've always had an extremely hard time putting on muscle, low testosterone probably.

Was just thinking that, if potassium is implicated as some kind of weight-loss amplifier, and I am already not eating a lot, then it might push my weight down further than I want.

Based on personal experience this depends on the ripeness of banana. As the banana ripens all the starch gets converted into sugar

A quick search is showing bananas have ~400 mg potassium. The study goal was to consume 2600 mg daily potassium, or the equivalent of 6.5 bananas. Bananas also have ~100 kCals, so that would require consuming 600 kCals daily to try and hit the potassium target.

It is worth remembering that potassium was identified as a potential target from their potato diet experiment. Potatoes have ~900 mg potassium.

Behold Japan’s Morning Banana Diet. Not a recommendation! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_banana_diet

The article describes an initial test where people ate 2000 calories of potatoes every day and lost weight. The potassium experiment was a follow-up.

98% of people are deficient in potassium. Does the extra potassium help or just being at the healthy level help?

It's water weight loss.

Potassium competes with sodium.

You take enough potassium and it becomes a diuretic.

This is the right answer!

Why are they doing studies and not measuring lean mass vs. water vs. fat? Might as well have had shoes on the first weigh in and bare feet on the last one!

That would probably be way out of budget for them (and would discourage most participants if they had to pay for it themselves). Even here, a bioimpedance body composition thingy is like 10$ and a DEXA scan is around 35$.

This badly needs to be the top answer, not languishing down at the bottom of the page like it is right now.

It never stops amazing me when weight manipulation curious people just ignore the entire history of bodybuilding and weight class sports. A standard American diet, especially if you ever eat out, is very high in sodium, and a high sodium:potassium ratio is one of the chief reasons people retain excess water. Either reducing sodium or increasing potassium is a time-honored way to quickly lose water weight that people in sports have been practicing for decades.

I don't understand the purpose of this "study" in the sense that if you practice some forms of water fasting whether for multiple days or practice eating only one meal per day OR a short 6 hour feeding window per day... you will know the role potassium plays in your body. You need water, salt, potatassium and magnesiums. If you're eating healthy whole foods your liver should have enough nutrients stored away. So basically your body is designed to go between feasting and fasting - to produce and burn ketones from your fat stores versus burning food you consume. The belief that you need to eat 3 meals a day or or snack small meals all day long (constantly producing insulin) is just nonsense. It is not that hard to supplement salt, potassium and magnesium and not eat for a day or more it is actually extremely benefifical for long term health to fast for about 3 days or more once or twice a year. Look up the fat lies by pradip jamnadas on Youtube.

Yeah just this week I've been eating only once per day in the morning. Plus a small protein shake if I got really hungry later. But the key is to get plenty of magnesium and potassium.

If you fast (no carbs specifically) and don't supplement with electrolytes you can go from feeling fine to suddenly feeling like you just need to lay down and have no energy. It's kind of scary

Yes - Honestly i think most people on any given day have no idea what it's like to go 24 hours with zero carbs or zero calories, most are just not aware of this whole paradigm. It's the complete opposite to the last 50+ years of official guidelines.

The keto diet, avoiding ALL manufactured vegetable seed oils (canola, cottonseed etc) ,rejecting ancel keys and the last 50+ years of completely horrible dietary guidelines and toxic food pyramids, fasting for autophagy, growth hormone, and restoring insulin sensitivity. Most cancers and diseases find their origin in high processed carbohydrate + seed oil diets, constantly triggered high insulin of the modern day.

calories in/out is nonsense.

So yea, no thanks on the Eat Potatos study lol

> calories in/out is nonsense

Purely for weight loss it is still sound though right?

No!

These posts are so stupid. The data graph is literally a normal distribution.

Just read some of the older posts. Claims that us on average eating 500 calories a day more than our ancestors is nothing to do with obesity. 500 extra calories a day gains you a pound of fat a week. Over years that would certainly make you obese. People don’t get fat in a two week period.

> In April 2022, we announced the Potato Diet Community Trial. We expected that the potato diet would be really hard to stick to and people would only lose a little weight, if any. But we were wrong — people said the potato diet was easy, enjoyable, and on average, people lost 10.6 lbs over 4 weeks.

Not surprising at all. This is the fad diet. Big business. Can they get to an ideal weight and stay there for 10 years (pregnancy excepted)? - is the real question!

There’s also this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6627830/

I wonder if one of the reasons I don’t seem to gain weight while being very sedentary, and eating quite a bit of sugar and fat, is that the salt I use is 50/50 sodium/potassium chlorides.

Any biochemists here who want to speculate about potential mechanisms? I can't help thinking about the connection between potassium and insulin -- insulin pushes potassium into cells, to the extent that insulin is the standard treatment for hyperkalemia -- but I can't see how that would result in changes in appetite (which I assume is responsible for the weight loss here).

I have a long expired biochemistry degree, but I think the only answer you are likely to find is wild conjecture. Potassium is common in natural food sources, maintained at a fairly steady concentration, and has not previously received much attention as a potential weight loss treatment.

If you follow the authors, they are pushing a Lithium hypothesis where lithium is tilting the lipostatic equilibrium towards more fat. Potassium is supposedly able to compete with lithium in the brain and reset the body baseline towards a slimmer build.

I have no idea if the theory is correct, but it is more compelling than a lot of the standard hog wash you find. If nothing else, I hope these results push for some more standardized testing: easy enough to pump potassium into a colony of obese mice models.

> Previously, we did a potato diet study and found that on average people lost 10.6 lbs over 28 days of potato diet, even though most of them took multiple cheat days. This was a pretty strong effect, so naturally we started wondering, why does it work?

Why would you recommend people go on a potato diet without a working theory on why people should go on a potato diet?!

If we are talking about anecdotes, I took a lot of potassium when I was trying to lose weight in 2020. The two things were independent: I didn’t take potassium for weight loss, but they did happen at the same time.

The result: the weight loss was not any faster or less painful or more persistent than my other attempts.

> We probably will not follow up on this study at 6 months and 1 year, since the average weight loss was so small. It seems unlikely that 0.89 lbs of weight loss will be statistically detectable several months later.

Don't waste your time following this diet, there are better and more effective ways.

seems too good to be true. If this was possible it would would be all over the news. Pharma companies have been looking forever for non-stimulant supplements that induce weight loss without the side effects of conventional weight loss medications. Given that such a drug would presumably be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in sales owing to the widespread obesity epidemic, there is great incentive to find one, yet none exists. Maybe eating bananas and potatoes induces weight loss due to low calorie density, not the potassium. Or because it's part of an overall diet regimen, which also includes exercise or cutting out soda.

I don't think any big pharma companies would be interested in providing a potassium supplement, as they are already cheap, readily available, and not able to be patented.

I have been taking Klor-Con M20 (20 mEq (1,500 mg)POTASSIUM CHLORIDE Extended-Release Tablets) from Upsher-Smith daily for 12 years.

You seem to be too optimistic about the motives of pharma companies. They need profits, and for that they need patentable drugs. They are not going to perform those very expensive randomized controlled trials for things they can't patent and sell for exorbitant prices. That's just the way it is.

That is why CFS wallows in pretrials and fokelaw about how to fix it. That old drug in a low dose is small business.

The diet people really want is the eat and drink what the hell you like in any quantity and lose weight. That would be a real hit.

The diet mentioned here is a restriction diet which is hard work. It is like the revelation of getting an extra $500/m side hussle by waiting tables.

Be very careful not to take in too much potassium, especially if you're taking medications that increase it(ex certain BP medications). That can cause palpitations as well as more severe heart anomalies.

First thing that came on my mind was The Martian book/movie and How the guy was eating only potatoes.

I need that diet now.

FWIW I did the potato diet in 2018 (Penn Jillette's book).

6'1.5" 250#.

Lost 17# in 2 weeks. Lost 35# in 2 months.

Stayed off as long as I was eating vegan, high-potato diet.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to stick with it for other reasons and I've since regained the weight. I need to cook for people for whom it's not a reasonable diet and enjoy eating meat too much.

The conceptual model here intrigues me. I'm pondering maxing potatoes but also eating whatever else I want and see if it helps.

(My coworkers literally called it the martian diet. It was funny. I would come to meetings at work eating a baked potato like an apple.)

who are these people, and do you trust them if they don't reveal anything about their identity or possible conflicts?

Obesity is less common at high altitudes because of the watershed. Environmental contaminants build up as water flows downhill and are in much higher concentrations as you approach sea level.

90% of the water I've drunk for the last 2 years has been either been bore water in the mountains, or rain water. It's had no impact on my weight,

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